A new issue and a video abstract – “Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes”

It seems everything is happening early here in the UK, with the PM calling a general election while the rest of us enjoy a remarkably summer-y spring, so at Antipode HQ we decided to publish volume 49, number 3 – June’s issue – in late April. Why wait, when the papers are this good…?

One of our authors, the University of Miami’s Tim Norris, has contributed the following video abstract, outlining what his paper is all about and how it might matter to scholars and activists alike. Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes makes the case that as conservation practice increasingly relies on private rather than state investment, there is a corresponding increase in the need to secure non-state financial resources to undertake conservation activities. In places where extraction and conservation exist in the same geographic spaces, there is a temptation (and tendency) to seek conservation funds from the nearby extractive efforts.

Tim’s paper explores the development of such relationships through a case study in the Andes of Peru where private conservation and mining exist in close proximity. The case shows that mining and conservation actors share the need to gain access to resources controlled by local communities and that the negotiation of this access can be undertaken together. As these mutually beneficial relationships form, care must be taken to avoid agreements based on corrupted information or agreements that may do injustice to the communities.

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú’s contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners–usually indigenous communities–to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.